I exported a piece from Newzik as XML and imported it into Dorico 5 Elements. I needed to break up the grand staff into two instruments in treble and bass clefs, so I created two new players with instruments in the desired clefs and copy/pasted the parts from the grand staff in to the new player staffs. Everything looked fine, but when I play it back it has extra time in some measures, i.e., extra whole or partial beats with no notes playing. Looks OK in write mode, but in play mode, the extra beats can be seen in the “roll”. How do I remove them?? Anyone know how they got there? I played around with (re)establishing the time signature (i.e., 2/4) at the beginning of the affected measures, which seems to have worked once or twice but no always. Thanks in advance for any pointers… this has cost me a LOT of time trying to figure it out.
Select the last note before the unexpected playback gap and look in the Properties panel in the lower zone. You will see that the Ends voice property is activated: deactivate it, and you should see the missing rests reappear.
I have a standard routine, after having imported a music.xml file into Dorico:
I select all
I filter by note and chords
I change the filter scope to deselect
Now I filter (deselect) grace notes
And I filter (deselect) tuplets
Finally in the property panel I uncheck all the “Start voice” and “End voice” properties.
This way I can be sure to actually see what I am working with.
ps.: I also have an end routine, so not to forget to set the filter scope back to “select”…
I select everything again, filter by slurs and “Reset appearance”.
There’s a rest visibility setting in Preferences > MusicXML Import. There are also various settings in there relating to slurs. You might save yourself various steps in this manual routine by going in and turning off these settings.
Yes, thanks pianoleo, it’s so grained in - and I actually like the routines…
In the mean time I have unticked all options for xml import except one.
But how does this address my issue? I want the measure to be the duration specified on the time signature.
The first thing to do is make sure all the rests are visible, as that will allow you to see where the extra musical time has been added. Once you can see the lay of the land, you can decide how best to fix the issue. Exactly what fix you should employ depends on the precise nature of the problem. Are the extra rests present in all instruments? If so, you can delete musical time from all instruments. Are they present in only one or two? If so, you can use cut and paste to move the musical material to close up the gaps.
OK… thanks for the help so far… now at least I see the rest in Write mode. Just can’t figure out how to delete it. “Remove Rests” should clearly be called “Hide Rests”, because it doesn’t actually remove them. I guess the other part of my question, (i.e., what are they doing in the piece) is more of a question for Newzik, but honestly, why on earth would Dorico simply absorb them without notice when they violate the stated time signature?
OK, discovered the bars and beats pop-over which let me remove beats from the afflicted measure… Now to go fix all the other measures with similar issue.
At least Dorico provides a (reasonably easy) solution.
It’s hard to come up with default settings for every option that will always produce the desired results in every scenario, particularly when importing MusicXML. You might want to maintain all of the graphical information possible from the MusicXML file, including invisible rests, or you might want to maintain none of it. Dorico can’t know in advance. Chances are, even you can’t always know that in advance!
But if you are in general using MusicXML as a means of accelerating your note input, you should go to the Preferences dialog, and on the MusicXML Import page, switch off as many of the options as you feel comfortable with. This will in general allow Dorico to treat the imported data as much like direct note input as possible, and it can then disregard things like rests that have been set to be invisible.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply, I appreciate it! And I totally get the desire to be “lossless” out of the gate WRT XML import. I just couldn’t think of a viable scenario where you would actually want to have extra time in a measure that is counter to the time signature of the piece. I will definitely go turn off some preferences in the import XML dialog before I import XML again (especially from Newzik, which seems to have some work to do WRT it’s handling of OMR and XML in general.)